שַׁפִּיר
fair
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H8209 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Hebrew form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Daniel 2 verses
- Daniel 4:12 שַׁפִּיר֙ adj Adjective ms The leaves of it were beautiful, and the fruit of it much, and in it was food for all: the animals of the field had shadow under it, and the birds of the sky lived in the branches of it, and all flesh was fed from it.
- Daniel 4:21 שַׁפִּיר֙ adj Adjective ms whose leaves were beautiful, and the fruit of it much, and in it was food for all; under which the animals of the field lived, and on whose branches the birds of the sky had their habitation:
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
The Hebrew adjective שפיר centers on the idea of “fair.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Daniel (100%). Debuting at Daniel 4:12, it then recurs through the corpus. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8209 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 2 verses 100%
By section of the Old Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 100%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Thereof were fair 1×, Were fair 1×
- American Standard Version: Thereof were fair 1×, Were fair 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Was beautiful 1×, Were beautiful 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Were beautiful 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8209 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8209 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8209 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8209 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- fair, beautiful (of foliage)
Word origin
שַׁפִּיר adj. fair, beautiful
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שפיר (Shâphîyr) (H8208) — Saphir.
Jastrow Dictionary
A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.
שַׁפִּיר
- (שְׁפַר)
- 1. handsome, pleasing; good; cheerful. Targ. I Sam. XVI, 12. Targ. O. Gen. XLVII, 6, (v. שֶׁפֶר ch.); a. fr.—Midr. Till. to Ps. XVI, 6 (in Hebr. dict.) על … נעשה לי ש׳ because I was content with my portion, it became beautiful to me; Yalk. ib. 667 (corr. acc.).—Kidd. 31ᵇ בעינא גברא דש׳ כותך I want a man as handsome as thou art; a. fr.—Pl. שַׁפִּירִין, שַׁפִּירַיָּא, שַׁפִּירֵי. Targ. Deut. VIII, 12. Targ. II Chr. VII, 10; a. fr.—B. Mets. 84ᵃ אנא … מש׳ ירושלם I am one of the survivors of the handsome men of Jerusalem. Ib. בני ש׳ כוותי children as good-looking as I am; a. fr.—Fem. שׁפִּירָא, שַׁפִּירְתָּא, שַׁפִּרְ׳. Targ. Gen. XII, 14. Ib. 11. Targ. O. Num. XII, 1; a. fr.—B. Mets. l. c. דש׳ מינאי who is handsomer than I am; a. e.—Pl. שַׁפִּירָן, שַׁפִּירָתָא. Targ. Gen. VI, 2. Targ. Y. ib. 1. Targ. Job XLII, 15; a. e.
- 2. (adv.) right, well. B. Mets. l. c. אטו … דש׳ קאמינא do I not know that what I say is right? Yoma 29ᵇ מאן קא מותיב ש׳ קא מותיב he who asked that question has asked well. Yeb. 94ᵇ והאי ש׳ נסיב and he married rightly (legally); והא ש׳ נסיב and he married this one lawfully; a. fr.—ש׳ דמי, v. דְּמֵי I.
שְׁפִיר
- (שפר; cmp. שׁוֹפָר 2, a. שְׁפוֹפֶרֶת) membraneous bag, sac of a fœtus; in gen. fœtus. Nidd. III, 3 המפלת ש׳ מלא וכ׳ if a woman discharges a sac full of water &c. Lev. R. s. 14; Y. Nidd. III, 50ᵈ top (ref. to Job XXXVIII, 9) לבושו זה הש׳ וכ׳ ‘its garment’ means the sac, ‘its swaddling band’, the placenta. Ib. ש׳ מרוקם a fœtus having an articulated shape, v. רָשׁוֹן; Bab. Nidd. 25ᵃ ש׳ שאינו מרוקם a shapeless fœtus. Y. Naz. VII, 56ᵇ I have seen עגל כאפון בש׳ the embryo of a calf, of the size of a bean, in a bag; a. fr. e.g. Job 38:9
שְׁפִיר ²
- Targ. Y. Deut. XXVIII, 57.—Nidd. 25ᵇ ההוא ש׳ דאתאי וכ׳ a fœtus was brought before Mar Samuel, and he said, this is forty-one days old; a. e.
A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 Hebrew verses it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.
Read these verses in the Septuagint
This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.
